The AP reports
"JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — Missouri's Republican-led Senate appears to have enough support to override Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon's veto of a bill that would enact one of the nation's strictest limits for unemployment benefits.
Although the legality of the veto override remains in doubt, sponsoring Sen. Mike Kehoe confirmed this past week that he plans to press ahead with the effort, and several senators who were absent when the bill originally passed told The Associated Press that they would support the legislation.
If every senator who originally voted for the bill does so again, the additional votes from the previously absent senators would provide the two-thirds majority needed to successfully override a veto.
The measure would cut the weeks of benefits available for laid-off workers from the current 20, which already ranks as one of the shortest in the nation, to as few as 13, if the statewide unemployment rate remains below 6 percent. Missouri's jobless rate was 5.8 percent in July.
An unemployment rate of over 9 percent would be needed to receive 20 weeks of benefits under the vetoed bill that links the duration of benefits to the jobless rate.
The bill also would increase the amount that must be in the state's unemployment fund before the fees are lowered for businesses that contribute to the fund and would add severance pay or termination packages as wages for unemployment aid eligibility purposes"
This is completely heartless bill that does not understand it takes people time to find a job. Even if a person is diligently networking and doing everything right, it still takes time for people to find the right job. Also, people today are economically squeezed to the core and do not have the vast personal savings to save for one to two years employment.
Not everybody can live in a house with where they share a room with somebody and has rock bottom rental prices. Not everybody can get special pricing for public transit or qualify for Medicaid benefits because the stupid state government believes that Medicare violates several tenets of conservative ideology.
Even for employers, it creates a more desperate labor market which does help employers weed out bad candidates and let people get time to increase their interview skills and job preparation.
Job hunting take times. I know from my experience that it took me two years to find the right job that barely pays me enough to live on but it is good fit where I am at in my career. Yet, I live in shared housing with ten other people and pay rock bottom prices for the bus because I qualify for disability pricing.
Other people have rents and kids to feed. They do not have the luxury of bus system that runs often in a major metropolitan area or have 700 jobs in Craigslist posting each week. Where I lives, plenty of jobs exist but my state offers everybody 26 weeks of unemployment not 13 weeks like in Missouri.
Most people in Missouri live in small towns where one to three employers make up the major part of the workforce. Due to competitive advantages of free trade that countries like China enjoy, jobs have migrated from small-town factories to overseas factories just because labor moves to the country with the lowest wages that market can offer. When the factory leaves, most jobs seem to disappear as well and few jobs will come back.
People need to have 52 weeks of unemployment pay in the current economy and up to 99 weeks during the worst of time. In places like Missouri, people need 52 weeks to find a job and not 13 weeks like the GOP producing. The manufacturing jobs that once drove the state are now gone and it just takes longer to find a lower-paying service sector job. Also, people cannot flee to North Dakota to work in the energy sector because those jobs are disappearing.
The idea of "pull your bootstrap" economy does not exist and not everybody to dig ditches at the local Labor Ready for $7.25 an hour. You cannot also migrate to some other part of the country where the economy is booming because the commodity markets are crashing.
The real way is entirely restructuring of the economy and blowing up the large trans-national companies for smaller companies and worker-owned companies. However, until that happens, people are going to need to longer-term unemployment insurance and not this cheap 13 weeks unemployment because being unemployed equates with laziness for the Missouri GOP. The reality that the GOP does not admit their part in destroying the manufacturing sector and then denies the people the method to collect on long-term unemployment benefits while they retrain at a community college in some other lower-paying service sector position.